Since last year, UAlbany has had a chapter of Minorities and Philosophy (M.A.P.). The organization is largely student run, and they've gotten funding from several sources to bring in a guest speaker for a symposium this Friday.

Readers in the capital region should note that it's open to the public.

PhilJobs, which hosts the on-line incarnation of Jobs for Philosophers, also hosts PhilJobs: Appointments. I just got an e-mail asking me to confirm a bit of news, so they could post it. If it's fit for them to post, it's fit for me to post.

I'm happy to say that Monika Piotrowska, who works in bioethics and philosophy of biology, will be joining the University at Albany philosophy department next year.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings reputation evaluation for 2015 has been released. After the top 100, they just group schools in brackets of 25. UAlbany's ranking is in the 226-250 bracket.

This is more or less consistent with other rankings and with a rough sense of UAlbany compares to other institutions. But I'm sure it's calibrated to give roughly the same results as other rankings, because they don't want to end up with results that seem too implausible.

My department has a widget on its homepage which lists recent department news, and I came in today to find that something had broken in the string of tin cans which I had relied upon turn the Facebook feed to RSS to Javascript to a news box. So the other things I had to do got put on hold while I tried to unbreak our website.

After some searching, I gave up on finding a solution that mirrors the Facebook feed. The same information, more or less, is posted to Twitter. And Twitter provides widgets for mirroring feeds.

However, actually getting one of the Twitter widgets required registering for Twitter. So I did. I had no interest in having a Twitter account for actually tweeting, but whatever.

Almost immediately, I got a notification that someone I know is now following me on Twitter.

[Insert hold music: dum dah dum, doo doo]

I got distracted mid rant. Returning to finish the post, I realized that I might actually prefer Twitter to social microblogging alternatives like posting on Facebook or Google+.

Twitter posts are in many ways like tiny webpages: You can get at them with third-party clients. They are public things that you can link to. You can aggregate or sort them in different ways.

Those are things which are good about the web.

Facebook posts and comments, in contrast, are kept inside Facebook's private garden. You can't link to them. You're at the mercy of Facebook's interface. And Facebook will filter what you and others see in whatever ways they decide to use for now.

My colleague Bonnie Steinbock has retired after long and distinguished service to the department. There was a retirement party for her earlier this week. This time, we thought to take a group photo before anyone had left.